Trauma, at first, is a wet wool blanket on the brain. You lie still, unable to move, and you don’t even notice the musty smell — you just give in completely to your body’s most basic functions. You can’t find your words but you can walk a confident path through the snake-like hospital labyrinth. You want to weep over simple arithmetic, but you can successfully maneuver your children through their bed time routines. Nothing is of your own volition, but you don’t resent the loss of control; you simply move forward where you can.

It’s later, I think, maybe seven or eight days in, when your senses figure out where your brain’s been holding you hostage. Each morning you wake a little bit sharper, a little more selfish. You start to whine. You start to notice the way you smell, how little you packed, how cramped your quarters and lumpy your makeshift bed. You find yourself crying over mismatched socks when four or five days earlier it hadn’t even occurred to you to do laundry, or that you even had feet at all.

Suddenly, you want to scream at everyone. You want to answer every flippant, oblivious email with Do you have any idea where I am? How could you ask me that?? You want them all to know the depths of your suffering. You want to kick the world in the shin of the leg it’s stupidly spinning on. You know now that everyone is going to be okay, that you’re only a few days from home, and so you are remembering, worrying, floundering. Your to-do list rises to the surface after you thought you’d weighted her down with enough stones and rope and brick — a surprise. You thought you’d learned to simply appreciate the “little things” but you haven’t, as it turns out, and you hate yourself.

And then, the sky. A sky larger and clearer and fuller than you’ve seen in ages. You stumble into a shallow bowl in a crisp, fallow wheat field and maybe you had to throw yourself off a cliff to find this spot but find it you did, and you forget everything else, because you hear something. The sky is calling you without yelling. She rearranges her lap to accommodate you despite your crass, whiny bulk, and she wipes your snotty face and she is generous as she whispers Sit. Rest. I’m so, so sorry.

I’m just so sorry.

And you believe her. And you feel bad for ever waxing so pathetic. And you settle into that soft spot where she cleaves and in that moment you know in your marrow that you don’t need anything, any time, anywhere, more than this.